Torment Ferment

What is the way? "I'm looking for something very different. The things that inspire me? There are some truly crazy, crazy people out there. You've got Jasko Gravner in Friuli making strange, strange wines. You've got a guy in the Loire named Claude Courtois who is producing very strange, weird wines without SO2" -- a standard-use preservative. "Some of them are fantastic, and they're from obscure grape varieties. You've got my friend Phillippe Viret in Cote du Rhone who is practicing something called cosmoculture, using stone beacons in his vineyard to redirect the various cosmic forces that flow through it. And he's using virtually no SO2 and producing extraordinary wines."

We have returned, it seems, to Grahm's concern at the poem's beginning -- with what he will leave behind. Only now, it has been coupled with the dream of terroir, with the dream of vinous greatness untainted by commercial concerns. "I think great wines inspire people in a profound way -- at least, they inspire me in a profound way. If I could do something that is truly unusual and extraordinary and unprecedented that could possibly lead other people to think along the same lines..." Why, that would be Paradiso.